When I Am the King

The fastest way to understand a group’s culture is to look at how the most powerful and the least powerful treat each other.

Parents and children.

Priest and congregation.

Boss and employee.

Politician and citizen.

In all these realms, how the most powerful and the least powerful treat each other tells you what you need to know.

When you look at the most powerful, do they truly listen?

Do they lift others, or do they bully?

Despite what they say, do their actions reveal care for others—or only a hunger to preserve their own dominance?

And the least powerful—

Do they challenge authority for a higher purpose, or merely seek the crown for their own heads?

Do they move with agency, rage, or a stupor of learned helplessness after years of being beat down?

Are they—even visible?

How do the most powerful and least powerful treat each other?

We judge others all the time. I do, and so do you—though we hopefully we try to be more holy than that.

But this question must turn inward, because we are not always the least powerful, however much we’d like to believe it.

The person who shapes the culture most, in my own life, is the one in the mirror.

If I am a parent, a boss, a leader in any form—how do I treat those with less power?

That tells me all I need to know.